Question about mesh deformer

[Laurent Bechir]

Hello,

Some question about mesh deformer and clothing. My friend is testing it with Exodus and I'm her  translator for english questions :)

1) Do  you still need to rigg clothing to the skeletton ?

2) Do you still need alpha ?

3) Can meshes able to be flex with this ?

`Thank you

[Cerise Sorbet]

1) Do  you still need to rigg clothing to the skeletton ?

Yes, the deformer will only work with rigged, attached mesh objects.

 

2) Do you still need alpha ?

For some items, yes. The deformer will not be a magic bullet for all kinds of glitches, but the glitches will at least be a little more consistent on different shapes.

 

3) Can meshes able to be flex with this ?

The deform patch will not change this. Rigged meshes will still move with the skeleton like they do now, but this will not enable the old flexiprim feature on them. This is a fancy kind of dynamic resizing, nothing more.  It did turn out that the avatar jiggle feature will become comatible with mesh.

[Nalates Urriah]

You can test the Alpha version of the Mesh Deformer with the Exodus and Nirans viewers. They integrated Qarl's code with their viewers this week.

[Laurent Bechir]

Then I don't understand what I read on the project page  :

 As public domain, this code will be the basis for others to implement a wide variety of additional changes but will initially serve the basic purpose of a single mesh deformer: To eliminate the need for rigging, weight adjustment, alpha maps and multiple sizes of clothing. 

[DanielRavenNest Noe]

That description is simply wrong.  Rigging is defining which bones a mesh object will be animated by.  Without that, clothing will not bend, since there would be no data telling the viewer how to move it.  The need to make multiple sizes, alpha maps, and adjust bone weights will be *reduced* but probably not eliminated.  The reason is that even with a working deformer, when the avatar body is changed a lot, clothing that fit properly will need to be reworked.  For example, in going from breast size 0 to 100, you likely would want to add triangles to maintain a smooth shape, and rework the UV map for texture distortion.  Still, doing 3 sizes would be better than 25. 

[Laurent Bechir]

 

If this is wrong, what is right in the whole project page ? Can I believe that people were asked fot money on wrong informations ?

[DanielRavenNest Noe]

You will have to ask Maxwell Graf, who I think wrote that page, why he wrote it that way.  My comments are based on my experience making rigged clothing for the Blue Mars world, and testing things in the SL mesh project since the beta started.  A working deformer will help a great deal to make clothing fit, but it cannot perform miracles.  The base SL avatar deforms badly when you use extreme slider settings, and clothing influenced by those deformations will be equally messed up if you don't make a version for that end of the settings.  By badly I mean textures will be stretched, and there are simply not enough polygons in the base avatar, so it becomes lumpy.  As a clothing designer, you can work around those issues by making more than one version to fit different general body shapes.